Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [122]
It’s a fair walk from here but I think I remember the way, so I set off for the Runden Ecke. I hope it’s still there, that this slick western-funded version is not all that remains of East Germany. I know that on the outskirts of town there are the usual socialist high-rises, but here the streets are cobbled and the buildings are grand. Carved faces stare down from the archways over arcades, and a row of karyatid creatures holds up the old theatre. I pass a music shop (this was the home of Bach), a bistro and a funeral parlour with a surprising range of offerings available, the sign says, ‘day and night’: burial, cremation, burial-at-sea and anonymous burials are listed, as well as ‘transport of coffins’. A dog walks purposefully along the pavement and somewhere, I think, a person is lost. Its high-headed confidence makes me smile. A man in a tobacconist’s window sees me and smiles back.
The building is still there, its vastness covering the block and ending in the round corner where the entry is. When I reach it, I see that the citizens’ committee’s museum still exists, and it’s open. Inside me a small stretched thing dissolves with relief. I go up the stone stairs. The entry to the exhibition is on the left, and to the Leipzig branch of the Stasi File Authority on the right. Nothing much has changed. I walk down the corridor past the workroom with the girly calendar, and the cell with its tiny window and bed, to the museum office. There are signs requesting donations for funds to keep the place running.
Frau Hollitzer’s not here today, but yes, her young colleague tells me, she still works with the Bürgerkomitee. I ask him about the new museum in town, and he shrugs and says something about the incompatibility of funding and autonomy. They had tried to negotiate with the federal authorities about having just one museum of divided Germany in Leipzig, and one run by easterners, but it hadn’t worked. This museum has been left a smaller, shabbier outfit than the other, but for all that, it’s more authentic: here, in this building where people were held and interrogated, and where, upstairs, their stolen biographies were filed away. I spend some time in the rooms, seeing the piles of file-pulp in one, the moustaches and wigs and glue in another, and the smell sample jars in a third. For me, this is where it all began. I buy a couple of books from the young man and leave. Outside it is hot; since morning the trees have deepened their green, and are making darker shadows. I have nothing more to do here but wander back to the station.
I walk through a small park where people are eating lunch on benches. The air is quiet apart from birdsong and the soughing of trams, and a rolling sound behind me getting louder. I turn and two boys on skateboards are coming towards me, fast. Before I can decide which edge of the path to keep to, they separate around me in graceful formation, one on each side, then join up again. I watch them glide out of the park. They perform the same manoeuvre on a girl in a phone booth. She keeps talking as she leans out of the box to see them skate on.
When I am near the phone I find myself looking at the girl. She’s wearing a white midriff top and jeans, and chewing gum as she chats. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but she’s completely absorbed in it, leaning one heel on her knee into the booth. She is probably sixteen, which means she was six years old when the Wall fell. She wouldn’t remember a time without telephone boxes.
Before I know why I am stopped here, she sees me and nods to let me know she won’t be much longer. I’m relieved for a moment to have found a purpose. But I’m stuck now. When she hangs up she waves and walks to her bicycle. I move to the booth. Sixteen, I think, sixteen was when she got on a train from here for Berlin and